By Steve Pomper
Intentionally lax law enforcement policies and laws combined with an unbalanced criminal justice system have many consequences for society, none of them good. For example, some communities, such as in West L.A., California, felt forced to hire private security. This can be effective, but it does other horrible things. Worst of all, it stamps on a community a lack of trust in its police services.
People need to have resources they can count on to respond to their calls for service but are frustrated because they already pay taxes to have people they can count on to respond to their calls for service. Now, they must pay twice for what their local government is supposed to guarantee—often by city charter.
As reported by ABC 7 News, the catalyst for the West L.A. residents was an hour-long delay in responding to a recent string of in-progress burglaries.
Another affront to people’s intelligence by state and local officials is the recent, according to Thomas Stevenson at The Post Millennial (and many other news outlets), Venezuelan gang members (Tren de Aragua), have taken over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado.
According to the New York Post, Colorado Governor Jared Polis disparaged Aurora City Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, claiming the takeover was “largely a feature of… [her] imagination.”
The downplaying of Jurinsky’s report lasted until she released a resident’s video surveillance footage, which “Fox Denver aired…” of an apparent armed gang takeover of her apartment building. Jurinsky told FOX News that she personally helped that resident safely move out of the building.
“Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman told Fox News on Thursday that ‘there are several buildings’ that have ‘fallen to these Venezuelan gangs’ in his city,” which backs Jurinsky’s claims.
So, why aren’t the police responding quickly, and some officials are downplaying crime? Primarily for one overarching reason: irresponsible officials abdicating their public safety responsibilities. These officials hop on emotional/ideological bandwagons because they believe it will help them retain power.
For example, in Seattle, the same city councilmembers who called for increasing police staffing during their campaigns did an about-face after Saint George Floyd’s death in police custody and instead called to defund the police—including firing 100 officers (which they wanted to do by race).
The city councilmembers reacted to a single obviously politically exploited and manipulated event in a police department 2,000 miles away while their police officers had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, the Marxist bandwagon must have had some comfy cushions.
The city even lost a popular police chief due to the council’s move to fire cops and city officials surrendering several blocks of the Capitol Hill neighborhood (CHOP/CHAZ “Summer of Love”), including a police precinct, to violent BLM/Antifa insurrectionists.
While they didn’t accomplish firing the cops, many times more than 100 officers have bailed and either resigned or retired from the department—and continue to do so. This exodus has led to critically low staffing, which has resulted in increased crime. With the recent payout of a well-deserved retro check (from working without a contract for years—again), expect another exodus soon.
What other consequences are there for a delay or lack of police response aside from hiring private security? Many neighborhoods, especially in high-crime areas, can’t afford to hire private security. They must rely on police departments that have become unreliable due to no fault of their own.
So, these folks do two things: They stop reporting crime, and some may feel forced to resort to vigilantism. Another consequence is they stop reporting crime at all. Then the officials responsible for causing the lack of cops reprehensibly exploit the non-reporting by citing the falsely lower crime stats as legitimate drops in crime.
This failure to report crime warps the entire system and any government response. We learned recently that the FBI doesn’t even collect statistics from some of America’s biggest cities. Yet, the usual suspects glommed onto the lack of reporting to pretend crime rates were decreasing. Shameful.
These phenomena also shred police morale, as if the cops needed any more reason to feel unappreciated—even hated—by those responsible for their professional well-being.
Another serious consequence of lax law enforcement, I’ve written about on these pages, is the potential for vigilantism. Suppose officials disregard their part of the social contract that maintains a civil society by promising to address lawbreakers vigorously, so you don’t have to, but they don’t do it. What are the people to do? This is not rhetorical; officials need to answer.
How can anyone blame the people for feeling forced to take the law into their own hands (where their officials have put it)? It’s either that or continue to suffer repeated victimization with no recourse because force is the only available alternative they have left. Otherwise, eventually, they will be left with nothing when local officials make sure only the law of the jungle applies.
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